Hey, everyone. I am Eric Rochow and this Real World Green, a show about practical things you can do to reduce your impact on the earth. Today I want to talk about one of those kind of no brainers that just occurred me the other day because it is starting to get a little cold, have some kind of Irish weather, if you know what I mean.
Wet and cold means, we turn on the heat and we just switch over from our analog thermostats and we got new digital thermostats and I did some research on the web here and here is what I have found out. Switching from an analog thermostat to a digital thermostat is going to save in a number of ways. First of all, there is no mercury in a digital thermostat. These analog thermostats, they have a mercury switch in them. And you can dispose of this properly, there is a number of links that I will put on the site as to where you can dispose properly of your old thermostat.
Second of all, these things are just more accurate. When you punch in 67 degrees, you will get 67 degrees on these things. And what I really like about these things is they are programmable. You pop this down, it has some preset programs and also you can customize it for what day of the week. Now, how many of you, you go to work and you turn down the thermostat before you go to work and then you leave the house and you realize, Oh, I forgot to turn down the thermostat. So you are humming along at 68 to 70 degrees all day in your house and you are not even there. With the digital programmable thermostats, it takes care of it. So it is one less thing to worry about so, it is lower stress, that is a little added bonus there.
Anyway, programmable, digital is the way to go. According to the Department of Energy, you are going to save about $150 a year, you are going to be greener because you are lowing your carbon emissions because you are not heating your house when you are not home. If you have air conditioning and you use a digital thermostat, you are going to save even more because you are not going to cooling the house all day when you are not there. You just have to cool down when you are on way home from work.
There are also IP thermostats, in other words, thermostats that you can plug into your internet connection and you can log in remotely and control the temperature of your house. So that is for the wonk in you, that is pretty cool. All right, so that is for today. Switching from—I have got my pocket here--from your analog thermostat to a digital thermostat, you will be a lot greener. All right, make it a great day and I will see you later. Am I rambling? Yes.
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